Ever since the Library of Congress announced an effort to lead us beyond MARC a year ago last May, many of us have been wondering just what the effort would produce. With the recent release of a report titled “Bibliographic Framework as a Web of Data: Linked Data Model and Supporting Services”, we have a much clearer, albeit not fully formed, idea of that.
The paper sets forward a model that is populated by Creative Works, Instances, Authorities, and Annotations. The goal of this new Bibliographic Framework (BIBFRAME for short), is to form a foundation for the future of bibliographic description that is fully web-enabled. “It is designed to integrate with,” the report states, ” and engage in the wider information community while also serving the very specific needs of its maintenance community — libraries and similar memory organizations. The strategies they are employing to achieve these ends are:
- Differentiate clearly between conceptual content and its physical manifestation(s) (e.g., works and instances)
- Focus on unambiguously identifying information entities (e.g., authorities)
- Leverage and expose relationships between and among entities
It is still early days, so many things remain less than fully fleshed out, but at least we have more information about LC’s direction than we’ve had previously.
To participate in the discussion, sign up for the BIBFRAME list.
For anyone who would like to take a quick look at some MARC to BIBFRAME transformations, I have a few online at:
http://kcoyle.net/bibframe/